Weather™ Incorporated: Environmental

Education, Postmodern Identities, and

Technocultural Constructions of Nature
Noel Gough, Deakin University, Australia

Abstract
In this essay I examine some of the ways in which nature is
textualized in technocultural discourses, with particular
reference to the incorporation of satellite-based weather
monitoring and digital imaging technologies into global
consumer markets of information and entertainment. I
argue that these discourses not only construct and mediate
our day-to-day experience of weather, but also help to
produce our identities as actors in the world by regulating
the social and cultural practices through which we interact
with nature. I suggest that critical readings of popular
media representations of weather, such as those I provide
here, are a necessary part of an approach to environmental
education that recognizes and problematizes our
participation in the cultural narratives and processes that
produce our understandings of “nature” and “culture” and
mediate their interactions.

Résumé
Dans cet essai, l’auteur étudie quelques–unes des façons
dont la nature est prise en compte dans les discours
technoculturels, en se référant plus spécifiquement à
l’introduction du monitoring de la météo par satellite et des
technologies de l’imagerie digitale dans les marchés
globaux de consommation de l’information et du loisir.
L’auteur soutient que non seulement ces discours
construisent et influencent notre expérience quotidienne du
temps qu’il fait, mais qu’ils contribuent également à
développer nos identités en tant qu’acteurs du monde en
régulant les pratiques sociales et culturelles à travers
lesquelles nous interagissons avec la nature. L’auteur

Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2, Spring 1997 145

 suggère de considérer la lecture critique des
représentations du temps (conditions climatiques)
véhiculées par les médias populaires, comme celles qui
sont fournies dans cet article, comme une composante
essentielle d’une éducation relative à l’environnement qui
reconnaît et questionne notre participation dans les
processus et les discours culturels qui produisent nos
compréhensions de la “nature” et de la “culture” et
influencent leurs interactions.

Strange Weather

All over the world

Strangers
Talk only about the weather
(Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennan, “Strange weather,” 1967)

. . . aside from general elections, weather forecasting is the only time

most of us see a national map
(Andrew Ross, Strange Weather, 1991, p. 242)

As an academic educator with unabashed ecopolitical commitments

(see, for example, Gough, 1989, 1994) the standpoint from which I
appraise many texts—including song lyrics and weather
forecasts—might best be described as ecocritical. In a recent essay
exploring a number of principles of ecocriticism, William Howarth
(1996) describes an ecocritic as “a person who judges the merits and
faults of writings that depict the effects of culture upon nature, with
a view toward celebrating nature, berating its despoilers, and
reversing their harm through political action.” While I share many
of Howarth’s own reservations about the adequacy of this definition,
it nevertheless serves my purpose here, which is to subject some
contemporary popular discourses of weather broadcasting to
ecocritical scrutiny. I do this from a poststructuralist perspective
which recognizes that the discursive networks to which we have
access in our everyday lives are significant in producing our
identities as actors in the world and regulating the social and
cultural practices through which we interact with nature.

146 Noel Gough

 I chose the quotations which open this essay not only because
they come from different works with the same title (although I
certainly hoped this would pique readers’ curiosity) but more
particularly because, despite their brevity, they gesture eloquently
towards the many different ways in which weather is implicated in
the everyday transactions through which we produce meanings of
self, others, and nature. Between them, these two quotations point
to four common sites of weather discourse: conversational ice-
breaking, popular song, mass media weather forecasts, and
academic texts. Weather may frequently be an explicit component
of commonplace cultural narratives such as these—exemplified here
by the way it works in exchanges of meaning between strangers as
a kind of “safe text” 1 —and also, as Ross’s generalization suggests,
it may implicitly frame others. That is, weather maps are daily
reminders of the physical shape and dimensions of whichever
nation-state we are inhabiting at the time, within which we tacitly
register our own specific geopolitical location and national identity.
For example, US weather maps typically show state boundaries and
significant topographical features—such as mountain ranges, major
lakes and rivers—but Canada and Central America are shown as
graphically empty, if depicted at all; Canadian weather mappers
are more generous in acknowledging that the North American
continent and its weather systems are shared by a number of other
countries.
I also chose these opening quotations because I believe that they
respectively mark rather different eras in Western weather-
consciousness. In the late 1960s, when Waits and Brennan wrote
their song, it was not unusual for weather to be produced in
intimate conversation—including the temporary, tentative, and
quite possibly illusory intimacy in which strangers, “all over the
world… talk only about the weather.” In the then dominant
traditions of popular song, weather was often deployed (via
metaphor and other figures of speech) to naturalize personal
feelings and emotions such as the radiant affection expressed by
such standards as “You are my sunshine,” or the more tentative
dawning of warmth and enlightenment in George Harrison’s “Here
comes the sun;” weather and its effects also provide key images in
representing the euphoria of Gene Kelly “Singing in the rain,” the
melancholy of Buddy Holly lamenting that it was “Raining in [his]

Weather™ Incorporated 147

heart,” the desperation of Elvis Presley searching in the cold
“Kentucky rain,” and the regret of Jimi Hendrix listening as “The
wind cries Mary.” Such constructions of weather are still with us,
but they now compete with weather produced on a much grander
scale using satellite-based optical technologies, digital data
processing, and computer graphics. As Jody Berland (1996) points
out, the images broadcast by MeteoMedia (the Montreal-based,
cross-Canadian, cable weather station), position us not as intimates
of the earth but as “post-panoptic” observers—we look down on the
earth’s simulation rather than up at the “real” sky.2 Songs that
evoke highly personal, individualized, and localized weather
sensitivity may be too esoteric and technoculturally unsophisticated
for the national and transnational consumer of weather channels
and websites—representations of weather that much more
obviously naturalize our social rather than our personal lives.
Indeed, one of the station identification slogans on the US Weather
Channel (a 24-hour cable service broadcast since 1982) asserts: “You
need us for everything you do.” Like the corporation that controls
Detroit in the movie Robocop 2 (Kershner, 1990)—Omni Consumer
Products: “the only choice”—the Weather Channel constructs
images of omnipresent weather effects which justify the production
of new forms of advanced weather-consciousness, such as the
weather-information needs that are assumed to be generated by an
increasingly mobile general population.
But, apart from frequent fliers, who are the consumers who
“need” a 24-hour televisual weather service for “everything” they
do? Ross (1991) infers the identity of the Weather Channel’s prime
audience from an analysis of its program and advertising content
and from the “almost inexhaustible” series of maps with which it
positions its audience as weather citizens:

fishing maps, business travel maps, picnic maps, indoor [and

outdoor] relative humidity maps,…tanning maps, allergy maps,… the
ominously named “aches and pains index,” influenza maps,
precipitation maps, radar maps, storm history maps, windy travel
maps, . . . each charting in detail the geographical distribution of
daily weather effects on our bodies, and each sponsored in turn by
the manufacturer of an appropriate product. (p. 242)

148 Noel Gough

But Ross (1991) also notes that:

among the many Weather Channel maps, there are no maps of acid
rain damage, deforestation, oil spill concentrations, toxic dump
locations, or downwind nuclear zones. In the absence of these
politically complex health and safety hazards, the responsible
weather citizen’s rights are only threatened with natural and not
social erosion. So too, the channel’s multiple address to individual,
(his) family, and nation is pluralist in principle but speaks
primarily to the citizen identity of a white male property-owner.
Ideal Weather Channel “citizens” are assumed to be comfortably
off, white-collar, with cars, boats, vacation options, families, and
gardens and homes that require extensive upkeep. (p. 241)

This analysis makes it particularly clear that, while the popularity

of cable weather services is often attributed to increasing public
interest in environmental issues, it actually presents a very partial
and distorted response to people’s curiosity about such issues in the
guise of a comprehensive one.3 However, the Weather Channel is
not alone i n this regard. T h e syndicated global
weather/environment feature, “Earthweek: Diary of a Planet,”
which regularly runs in such daily newspapers as the Toronto Star,
the Vancouver Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Melbourne’s The
Age, is a similarly partial and distorted selection from what it
appears to be sampling, albeit on a much smaller scale than the
Weather Channel (a little less than half a page of tabloid newsprint
per week compared to round-the-clock broadcasting).4 For example,
“Earthweek” for the week ending September 6, 1996 (as printed in
the Education supplement of The Age, Melbourne, September 10,
1996), as usual provides a schematic map of the world with symbols
indicating the (very) approximate location of the events that this
particular “Diary of a Planet” records. These include the highest
and lowest temperatures recorded on earth during the week (48˚C
in Kuwait City and -67˚C at the South Pole respectively), together
with symbols which explanatory notes reveal to be sites of extreme
weather conditions, natural disasters, severe environmental
management problems, and what might best be called nature study
trivia (with an emphasis on the bizarre); the headlines for the one-
or two-paragraph explanations of these symbols are as follows:

• Thousands flee hurricane5

Weather™ Incorporated 149

 • Three quakes rock Algeria
• Wildfire claims buffaloes
• Poachers slay elephants
• Sydney storm
• Suicide walrus mystery
• Psychic pets revelation.

Other events that are typically recorded in “Earthweek” include

floods, volcanoes, and launchings/landings of space exploration
vehicles (the number of items devoted to space exploration and/or
bizarre nature trivia tends to be inversely proportional to the
availability of news of extreme weather, natural disasters, and other
severe environmental problems). While most newspapers publish
this feature in weekend editions—often quite literally positioned
between the news and weather sections—Melbourne’s The Age
relocated “Earthweek” at the beginning of 1995 from its Saturday
edition to its weekly Education supplement. This move reinforces
my impression that “Earthweek” represents a convergence of
environmental journalism with the exploitation of natural disasters
and catastrophic weather as relatively juvenile forms of
entertainment, most recently epitomized by the movie Twister (De
Bont, 1996) and the Time magazine cover story of May 20, 1996 that
coincided with the film’s release in North America. The
“Earthweek” headline, “Suicide Walrus Mystery,” and the Time
cover story’s title, “On the Trail of Twisters: What Scientists Are
Learning About the Mysteries of Tornadoes,” also exemplify the
tendency in much science and environmental
journalism—especially when directed towards children—to position
nature as “mysterious” (with “secrets” to be “discovered”). This can
be read as an implicit trivialization of the issues on which such
journalism is focused.
“Earthweek” and Twister can also be understood as products of
a weather merchandizing industry that helps to sustain a global
consumer market for the continuous, satellite-based weather
forecasts that constitute the core program content of televisual
services like MeteoMedia and the Weather Channel. But, as Berland
(1996) argues, while the scope and expense of satellite surveillance
services far outweigh their usefulness in routine weather
forecasting, the popularity of weather broadcasting helps to
legitimate and subsidize huge expenditures on space and

150 Noel Gough

communications technologies with mainly military origins and
purposes that would otherwise have to be funded entirely by
government and defence industries. The socially beneficial
applications of weather forecasts may appear to be obvious in
countries like Canada and the USA, where hurricanes, snow storms,
and other extreme weather conditions may affect everyday life and
commerce. But in highly urbanized countries like Australia, where
the vast majority of the population is concentrated in regions that
are largely unaffected by catastrophic weather effects, there are
very few significant practical benefits that warrant our apparent
compulsion to consume the products and by-products of
increasingly sophisticated weather forecasting technologies.
Nevertheless, popular representations of weather clearly function in
ways that regulate and naturalize our day-to-day lives, as I will
now demonstrate by examining in some detail two recent
Australian newspaper reports dealing with the subject of weather
forecasting.

Four Seasons in One Day

Even when you’re feeling warm

The temperature could drop away
Like four seasons in one day . . .

It doesn’t pay to make predictions . . .

(Neil Finn & Tim Finn, 1991a) 6

On Tuesday, July 16, 1996, The Age reported technological advances

in “numerically modeling the earth’s atmosphere” that would take
weather forecasting “from the lap of the gods to the laptop”:

Bright Outlook on the Future of Forecasting

The unpredictable may soon be predictable. Come rain or shine
Melbourne’s legendary four seasons in one day will be forecastable
seven days ahead with twice the present level of accuracy thanks to
the world’s most sophisticated weather technology developed in
Australia.
Requiring no more than a personal computer to run, the
forecasting system is up to 10 times faster than existing methods.
The Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne . . . can now resolve
weather details down to grid areas that are 75 kilometres by 7 5

Weather™ Incorporated 151

 kilometres across; the best system in the United States, being used for
the Atlanta Olympics, is detailed to 2.2 kilometres. The new
Australian system resolves detail down to 500 metres and further
development will sharpen this to 100 metres in time for the 2000
Sydney Olympics. (Spinks, p. A2)

Even within this brief excerpt we can discern several ways in which
contemporary weather forecasting technologies exemplify the
“postmodern condition,” as characterized by a number of cultural
theorists. For example, as mathematical modeling of the earth’s
atmosphere becomes more sophisticated, we increasingly seem to
be responding to what Jean Baudrillard (1983) might call simulations
of weather rather than to weather itself. Furthermore, our desire for
continued acceleration of these simulations (the new forecasting
system “is up to 10 times faster than existing methods”) exemplifies
Paul Virilio’s (1986) concept of “speed fetishism.” More significantly,
perhaps, the above article’s emphasis on the desirability of
increasing the resolution of detail in atmospheric observations also
marks weather forecasting as a technology of subjectification in
Michel Foucault’s (1975/1977) terms. Foucault argues that
postmodern societies are characterized by increasing levels of self-
imposed discipline, scrutiny and surveillance and, moreover, that
we actively deploy our material and intellectual resources in pursuit
of their achievement. The popularity of mobile telephones is
currently one of the more obvious examples of this tendency, but
weather forecasting also deploys disciplinary power/knowledge
(Spinks’ article elsewhere stresses the complexity of the mathematics
on which the new system is based) to refine ever more effective
technologies of scrutiny, surveillance, and normalizing judgment.
While the object that ostensibly draws the weather forecaster’s gaze
is the planetary “body,” the references to the Atlanta and Sydney
Olympic Games also suggest that, in Ross’s (1991) words, “it is the
weather-sensitive [human] body rather than the weather itself that
is the visible object of all this new knowledge” (p. 243). This
becomes even more apparent in another news item which appeared
in The Age on Tuesday, September 17, 1996:

September Springs a Nine-Year High With 28 Degrees

152 Noel Gough

 The hottest September day in nine years had everybody talking
yesterday. Even experts at the Bureau of Meteorology were excited.
A senior forecaster . . . said computer models forecasting 1 9
degrees and a cloudy day for Melbourne were proven wrong.
Yesterday reached a sunny 28.1 degrees at 2.30pm. (Winkler, p. A7)

I admit that my decision to quote from this item was motivated in

part by the sheer pleasure I take from the earth’s
unpredictability—from its resistance to the forecasters’ disciplinary
power/knowledge. But, this item also illustrates how the plethora of
statistics that typically accompany weather stories create self- and
socially-regulatory fields. Placed above this item’s headline is a
shaded box with a thermometer graphic symbol and, under the title
“Mercury Rising,” four dot points including:

• Yesterday was the hottest day ever in the first half of

September (up to and including September 16).
• It was the hottest September day since the day after the
1987 [Australian Football League] grand final.

Ross’s (1991) analysis of similar kinds of statistical presentation on

the Weather Channel is pertinent here:

Discourse that situates the current weather in relation to a history

of weather statistics functions as a way of normalizing our
physical life, regulating its mean or average behavior in relation to
an archive of temperature records. Abnormalities like record highs
or record lows are part of the regulatory field of differences that
locate our current degree of deviation from a norm of environmental
behavior for which we are then made to feel responsible in some
way. Statistics about the mean, norm or average belie the fact that
there is no such thing as “normal” weather, let alone a “normal”
climate; these average figures play the role of normalization for us.
(p. 243) 7

Precisely how we are “made to feel responsible” for “normal”

weather and climate becomes apparent in two further paragraphs of
Winkler’s (1996) report:

Meanwhile Mr Chris Ryan from the bureau said the ultraviolet

index would be an average reading of four today. Speaking after the
launch of the first UV radiation forecasts, he said the ultraviolet

Weather™ Incorporated 153

 level, on a scale of one to about 16, would be measured each day and
included in forecasts.
Occasional patches of ozone thinness would boost the reading
by one or two points, but the biggest factors affecting it would be
clouds and latitude, he said. (p. A7)

Thus, from September 17, 1996, Australian weather consumers have

yet another statistic to add to those that already quantify their sense
of responsible weather citizenship. Ozone thinness may be a
relatively minor variable in determining the UV index, but it is
nevertheless mentioned first, and we are reminded that its effect is
to boost the reading. Our knowledge of our own contributions to
ozone depletion adds another layer of weather responsibility and,
whenever the UV index exceeds the “normal” range, a new level of
concern. It is by no means certain that these concerns will be
deployed in self formation and social interaction in ways that
conform with the expectations of institutionalized authority.
Individuals may take up this particular discourse of responsible
weather citizenship in various ways, and to various degrees,
determined at least in part by their sense of their own and other
people’s agency in relation to what they assume to be “natural.”

It’s Only Natural

Ice will melt, water will boil

You and I can shake off this mortal coil
It’s bigger than us
You don’t have to worry about it . . .
It’s only natural . . .
(Neil Finn & Tim Finn, 1991b)

The changing ways in which weather is represented in popular

media are symptomatic of changing and contested relationships
between nature and culture. Like Donna Haraway (1989), “I am not
interested in policing the boundaries between nature and
culture—quite the opposite, I am edified by the traffic,” (p. 307) but
the unity and stability of the meanings we attribute to nature are
crucial components of the everyday discourses which produce our
ecopolitical identities and regulate our social and cultural practices.

154 Noel Gough

 In modern industrial societies, nature has often been defined as
“other to culture.” Shane Phelan (1993) observes that “the
opposition to ‘culture’ provides the bedrock meaning of ‘nature’ in
the West, but this opposition has become fraught with tension” (p.
44). A significant corollary of this definition is that the opposition to
nature “provides the bedrock meaning” of the “cultivated”
subject—that is, the educated person—in western society. The
destabilization of this particular meaning of nature has been a
favorite rhetorical strategy of many green cultural critics. For
example, as Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis (1989) write:

The cultivator, as artist or critic, like the scientist, has so often

regarded nature as low, as threat, as transcended origin and
therefore in need of conquest and domination. The cultivated subject
is seen to be the mind grown above nature and in command of it,
totally separate from the baseness of body.
This discourse has self-evidently failed. Humanity has damaged
its own ecosystem, its collective and interdependent body, through
the alienation of self from a nature that is external, other. (p. 230-
231)

This is conventional wisdom among many environmentalists (and

environmental educators) but for Fry and Willis (1989) it seems to
suggest that mainly negative consequences—such as the “alienation
of self” from nature—follow from the construction of nature as
“external, other.” By way of contrast, Bill McKibben (1990), in a
eulogy for what he calls “the end of nature,” draws attention to the
self-constitutive force of differentiating ourselves from nature’s
externality and otherness:

When I say that we have ended nature, I don’t mean, obviously, that
natural processes have ceased—there is still sunshine and still
wind, still growth, still decay . . . . But we have ended the thing that
has, at least in modern times, defined nature for us—its separation
from human society . . . . [emphasis in original]
We have killed off nature—that world entirely independent of
us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and
supported our human society . . . . In the place of the old nature rears
up a new “nature” of our making. It is like the old nature in that it
makes its points through what we think of as natural processes

Weather™ Incorporated 155

 (rain, wind, heat), but it offers none of the consolations—the retreat
from the human world, the sense of permanence and even of eternity.
(p. 60, 88)

Thus, McKibben regrets the loss of a particular meaning of

nature—of the “comforting sense . . . of the permanence of our
natural world,” (p. 7) reassuringly impervious to human action and
will—but he is not so much grieving the death of nature as
mourning the loss of the ontological security blanket with which
nature once enveloped us. McKibben is alerting us to the possibility
that “killing off” nature as a foundational reality that exists outside
of human agency is one more way of bringing the foundational self
into question—by collapsing the boundary that once separated us
from nature, we have made it more difficult to recognize and
identify ourselves as autonomous, unitary, centered subjects.8 It
may still be possible, in Richard Rorty’s (1989) terms, to say that a
world is “out there” that is “not our creation,” and that “most things
in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include
human mental states” (p. 5), but it is becoming increasingly difficult
to identify “natural” phenomena in our everyday lives that do not
bear the mark of human agency (a particularly obvious example
being the well-publicized effects of greenhouse and ozone-depleting
gases on the earth’s atmosphere). I should make it clear that I do not
share McKibben’s regret but, rather, see the dissolution of the
human-nature boundary in similarly positive terms to the
dissolution of the human-machine boundary—as providing
opportunities to create, in Haraway’s (1991) words, “a cyborg world
. . . in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with
animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities
and contradictory standpoints” (p. 154; see also Gough, 1995).
A further tension in the relations of nature and culture is
provided by the tendency for culture itself to be “naturalized.” For
example, Fredric Jameson (1991) writes that:

Postmodernism is what you have when the modernisation process is

complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world
than the older one, but one in which “culture” has become a
veritable “second nature.” (p. ix-x)

McKenzie Wark (1994a) goes a step further than Jameson by

equating postmodernism with the qualitative changes in the social

156 Noel Gough

relations of culture enabled by “third nature” (for which he has
more recently adopted the term “virtual geography;” see Wark,
1994b; Gough, 1996):

Second nature, which appears to us as the geography of cities and

roads and harbours and wool stores is progressively overlayed
with a third nature of information flows, creating an information
landscape which almost entirely covers the old territories. (p. 120)

The destabilization of “nature” by virtual geography is especially

apparent in the ways many of us now experience weather. While
we may still attend to the ways in which we engage physically with
the weather, we have also naturalized the technologies through
which weather is presented to us as an abstraction: to interpret or
forecast the weather we are more likely to look at a television screen
than the sky. Our cultural activities—industrial pollution,
urbanization, agribusiness—have quite literally “constructed” the
greenhouse effect and eroded the ozone layer but our knowledge of
these and the many other complexities of climate change is
constructed by the global network of weather stations, satellites,
supercomputers, meteorologists and broadcasters that produce the
images, models, and simulations that are the material
representations of that knowledge. In this sense, as Berland (1994)
writes, “the weather can no longer be considered ‘natural’ . . . but
(like gender and other previously ‘natural’ concepts) must be
understood as [a] socially constructed artifact” (p. 106).

Weather With You: Implications for Environmental Education

Everywhere you go
You always take the weather with you
(Neil Finn & Tim Finn, 1991c)

For those of us who dwell in highly urbanized and technologized

societies, much of what now counts as “nature” consists of the
measurement and projection of human culture’s interactions with
the biosphere in and on a virtual ecology of global information
flows. Under these circumstances, I find it most helpful to think of
environmental education as a struggle to come to pedagogic terms
with the “narrative complexity” (Gough, 1993) generated by the

Weather™ Incorporated 157

categorical ambiguities and entanglements that now attend such
concepts as self, culture, nature, and artefact. To date, little of what
is performed in the name of environmental education has engaged
(or sought to engage) this struggle but, rather, tends to reflect and
to naturalize models of social interaction in which “rational”
behaviour is assumed to follow from human actors pursuing their
more or less enlightened self-interests in maximizing utilities and
amenities or satisfying preferences. Environmental education
typically depicts the forms of knowledge it privileges (whether this
be abstract science or experiential fieldwork) as being instrumental
in enabling humans to pursue such “rational” choices but ignores
the ways in which human agency is produced by, and within, the
complex circuits and relays that connect—and contingently
reinforce—knowledges and subjectivities in the technocultural
milieu of postmodern societies. Yet the extent to which knowledges
are authorized, and the manner in which they are (or are not)
mobilized in the form of dispositions to act (or not), may be very
sensitive to different cultural traditions, values, and identities. For
example, Brian Wynne (1994) argues the need for caution in
predicting the effects of providing people with scientific knowledge
of global environmental change:

The assumption is that increasing public awareness of global

warming scientific scenarios will increase their readiness to make
sacrifices to achieve remedial goals. Yet an equally plausible
suggestion is that the more that people are convinced that global
warming poses a global threat, the more paralysed they may become
as the scenarios take on the mythic role of a new “end of the world”
cultural narrative. Which way this turns out may depend on the
tacit senses of agency which people have of themselves in society.
The more global this context the less this may become. Thus the
cultural and social models shaping and buried within our sciences,
natural and social, need to be explicated and critically debated. (p.
186)

Comparable arguments can be mounted in relation to efforts by

socially critical environmental educators to increase public
awareness of, say, the extent to which scientific models of global
warming reflect the interests of developed countries and obscure the
political domination, economic exploitation, and social inequities
underlying much global environmental change. Again, we cannot
assume that such knowledges will mobilize people “to make

158 Noel Gough

sacrifices to achieve remedial goals.” To do so would be to ignore
the possibility of what Wynne (1994) calls “the intrinsically
alienating effects of knowledge which constructs people in
environmental processes as if they are merely reproducing and
extending consumer-based capitalism” (p. 187) (to which we could
add imperialism, colonialism, and so on).
Such considerations lead me to suggest that in environmental
education we need to attend much more closely to the micro-politics
of subjective life, though not, I must emphasize, as a further
exercise in the kind of scrutiny and surveillance that we already
practice to excess in education and educational research. Rather, we
need to participate more fully, self-critically, and reflexively in the
cultural narratives and processes within which identity, agency,
and knowledges are discursively produced. Put bluntly,
environmental education should be less concerned with “nature”
than its cultural invention. In terms of the specific aspect of nature-
culture relations that I have addressed in this essay, we need to
recognize that “our” weather is not only that which some of our
senses might tell us is “real,” but also the weather that is produced,
simulated, and performed for our pleasure in various broadcast
media. Questions about whose weather we take with us (everywhere
we go), and for what purposes and with what effects, are by no
means simple—but they are, I believe, well worth asking.

Notes
1
At the risk of over-extending a metaphor, one could say that
weather has long functioned like a condom in casual textual
intercourse.
2
Images of the earth photographed from space can be read in many
ways. James Lovelock (1987) describes Gaia theory as a synthesis of
“ancient belief and modern knowledge” inspired, in part, by “the
awe with which astronauts with their own eyes and we by indirect
vision have seen the Earth revealed in all its shining beauty against
the deep darkness of space” (p. ix). These images also seem to have
reinforced the appeal of the “spaceship earth” metaphor and other
conceptions of global community, ecological interdependency, and
biospheric fragility. Such readings appear to me to be at best
romantic and at worst hubristic, arrogantly taking the benefits of a
god’s eye view for granted while ignoring the costs of obtaining it.

Weather™ Incorporated 159

3
Ross (1991) makes the rather strange assertion that the “success of
the Weather Channel” lies at least partly in “expanding the
definition of weather to include all of the ways, forms and contexts
through which our body responds to and is constructed by discourse
about the environment” (p. 242). This conclusion is patently
indefensible in the light of his own analysis of the Weather
Channel’s occlusion of ecopolitical issues.
4
“Earthweek’s” website, <http://www.slip.net/~earthenv/>, has
numerous links to sources of further information about the weather
and environmental news it reports.
5
Under this headline are brief details of the effects of the two
hurricanes and two tropical storms that the world map shows as
being in the vicinity of the USA; hurricane Orson, shown in the
vicinity of Japan, is not mentioned.
6
All of the songs by Neil and Tim Finn from which I quote here are
performed by Crowded House on the album, Woodface (EMI/Capitol
Records).
7
In a review of The Day Niagara Falls Ran Dry! Canadian Weather
Facts and Trivia (Phillips, 1996), Scott Mair (1996) exemplifies the
tendency to use weather statistics “as a way of normalizing our
physical life” when he describes one chapter, “Weather Across
Canada,” as “a coast-to-coast-to-coast look at how we compare with
each other in the sunshine, rain, frost, fog, humidity and cloud
categories.” He further exaggerates this tendency by concluding
that “St. John’s may be Canada’s weather champion—Canada’s
foggiest, snowiest, wettest, windiest and cloudiest place . . .” (p. 21).
8
These (or similar) terms are often invoked in characterizing the so-
called “crisis of the self” precipitated by new information
technologies (see, for example, Barglow, 1994, pp. 64-5) and
biotechnologies (see, for example, Haraway, 1991), but less attention
seems to have been given to the possible significance of global
environmental change in problematizing the boundaries of the
postmodern subject.
Notes on Contributor

Noel Gough is Associate Professor and Deputy Director, Deakin

Centre for Education and Change, Deakin University, Victoria,
Australia. His current research focuses on narrative theory and
popular media culture in education, with particular reference to
qualitative research methodologies, curriculum change,

160 Noel Gough

environmental education, and science education. He is the
Australian Editor of the Journal of Curriculum Studies, an Executive
Editor of The Australian Educational Researcher, and a member of the
North American Commission for Environmental Education
Research. In the fall of 1995 was a Royal Bank Fellow in
Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education at Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

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